Old World
Played about an hour of this 4X demo, a couple of tutorial missions. Many say it's like if Civ and Crusader Kings had a baby, which seems a reasonable summary at first glance. Lead designer worked on Civ3 and was lead on Civ4, and since produced Offworld Trading Company, so no surprise OW is a quality product… albeit with a somewhat unfortunate acronym
Map is hex based, with 1UPT rule—that's one unit per tile, altho looks like you can stack a civilian with a military unit. Looks great, lovely artwork, and Christopher Tin did the music—so again, no surprise the soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy… USA's biggest music award.
OW spans only a few centuries in the Ancient and Classical eras, and leaders die and are succeeded by their heirs. Family dynamics and alliances are an important strategic layer, and religion seems to have a big role too.
2 main different mechanics I noticed:
Orders
In Civ, every turn each unit can make a move or take an action. In OW, you have a bank of actions each turn called Orders—say you have 10 orders for this turn. One unit can use them all up, 2 units could do 7+3, 10 units 1 each, etc—which makes for a nice freedom of choices each turn, should be tactically interesting.
Fixed City Sites
Civ has the decision of settling on turn 1, or moving to what might be a better location. OW has specific tiles where you must build your cities—in the demo, each one apart from first had a Barbarian camp on it—so you had to train a Warrior and send him to capture the location, and then send a Settler there to found another city. This should avoid the early indecision, and the frustration of settling on an important resource like Iron.
I like it, definite future purchase.
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